⏩

Product Management

Product Planning and Roadmap Cycle

A robust planning process should follow a multi-step cycle that takes care of different time horizons.

image

A strong roadmap process is essential for several reasons:

  • Forces setting of strategic priorities and hard trade-offs
  • Enables capacity planning for staffing and infrastructure
  • Provides sense of reliability and predictability to key customers (and investors!)
  • Revenue impact planning for relevant key features

πŸ’‘
Pitfall: Jumping directly from the grand long-term vision right into nitty-gritty sprint deliverables without fleshing out the middle layers first is a frequent mistake. It will lead to a growing disconnect between long-term planning and what the product team is working on.

Product Management Deliverables:

πŸŒ„
Product Vision
πŸ—ΊοΈ
Roadmaps
🎨
UI Design
πŸ‘©πŸ»β€πŸ”¬
Customer Research

Useful Resources

β€£
πŸ—’οΈ Blogs

Silicon Valley Product Group

Marty Cagan's ongoing blog

Mind the Product

Mind the Product also organises regular meetups, conferences and runs a very active slack group. Its content covers all aspects of product management.

Lenny's Newsletter

By Lenny Rachitsky, former founder (Airbnb acqui-hire) & product lead at Airbnb. Covers multiple high level topics but also deep dives such as retention rates

β€£
πŸ“š Books

Cagan: Inspired

A comprehensive guide to the practices of product management.

Moon: Different

How to build truly differentiated products in crowded markets.

Donoghue and Newell: Envision Product

A focused guide on how to get user experience right for startups

Segall: Insanely Simple

Few companies have perfected the art of simplicity as Apple has. A view behind the scenes of Apple's product design and marketing processes.